The RPS Bargain Bucket: Black Saturday

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Here, in Malaysia, Hungry Ghost Festival is slowly creeping towards the end and soon, it will once again be safe to gallivant through dark alleys. Or something. (You shouldn’t visit dark alleys anywhere, folks. It is a Bad Idea.) This week has been a turbulent mess, for more than one reason, and I apologize for the lack of caffeine-driven cheer. It rather doesn’t help that today has been declared a national occasion for mourning. But where there is life, there is hope! At least, that’s the idea. Enjoy this week’s bucket of bargains, and Mike Luard’s Sonic the Hedgehog Plushie.

TitanfallOstensibly 50% off, but read below for nuances
Parkour-loving future marines and giant robots go together like peanut jelly and butter, right? Assuming you’re willing to brave Origin, it looks like the company has a discount on Titanfall, that first-person shooter that people wouldn’t stop talking about for a few months and I won’t play because a 52G download will mangle my poor hard drive. Interestingly, prices appear to vary depending on your location. More importantly, if you’re willing to bend a few rules and cajole Hola into co-operating with you, you may be able to pick up Titanfall for even less than the listed price. Beware the effect it may have on your immortal soul (and your Origin account.)

Dishonored$4.99/£2.49/€3.74
If you have a spare weekend, chances are you won’t even need to purchase Dishonored. Set within Dunwall, where whale bones and black magic abound, this first-person action game varies between being very clever and a plain delight. Featuring what is arguably my favorite “stealth” sequence yet, Dishonored comes with a garden of killing techniques and plenty of ways to circumnavigate murder. I loved it furiously, even though Corvo isn’t the best protagonist in the Assassin’s Guild, so to speak.

Gumshoe Music BundlePay $14.75/£8.90/€11.14 for everything
Here, let’s put away the machinery and subtle killers for a moment. Bundle of Holding is selling “atmospheric soundtracks for investigative roleplaying” for rather cheap. Although unusual, the whole idea does certainly make sense. If digital games can be paired with music, why not tabletop campaigns? But, my mind remains blown. According to the official website, the bundle features at least six dozen short tracks intended to evoke “cinematic moods” appropriate for any situation, including those with angry tentacled beings of all stripes. Somewhere in that atmospheric mix, there also lurks the narrative talents of Wil Wheaton. Why? Because, I suppose. Because. Enjoy? Maybe? I think so. If you do buy the bundle, make sure to catalogue your experiences with it in the comments, okay?

Theme Hospital$2.39/£1.44/€1.80
I have vague but happy memories of Theme Hospital, which was an astonishingly cheery experience in spite of the fact it had a confused thirteen-year-old helming a medical institute. There is a monstrous quantity of silliness to be found here. Fix absurd ailments! Deal with outrageous patients! Clean up vomit and then make money by ruthlessly ensuring that all drinks are far too overpriced! Who can afford to question the legality of your decisions when their very lives are dependent on your whims? Something something or the other. Either way, Theme Hospital is a fantastic little diversion. I will lob a plushie at anyone who claims otherwise.

The Walking Dead Pack – $8.10/£4.89/€6.12
There are games that require introduction, and there are games that make me raise my eyebrows very slightly and go, “What? Really? You haven’t heard of this? Can you tell me that with a straight face?” The Walking Dead pack comes with Season 1 and the 400 Days DLC.

Get Games’ Indie Carnival
Doubt, thy name is, er, I. Get Games is currently orchestrating an Indie Carnival, one that may be of interest to certain people. A wealth of cool games are currently on sales. The list includes Doorways, Surgeon Simulator 2013, the Cognition games, and The Cave. What’s interesting is that it looks like the discounts increase depending on the number of games you purchase. I’m a bit leery about telling you to go out and spend with wild abandon, but there may well be something for you here. Keep an eye out.

The Dirty Dozen Discount
Look! There! In the bushes! Blackwell Epiphany at 40%! And Infested Planet at 50%! Sir, You are Being Hunted by a discount too! I have a suspicion that these aren’t the best prices any of these games have been at. However, there’s a reason you should consider purchasing stuff from the Dirty Dozen promotional event. According to the website, “All 100% of your cash goes to the people who made the games. This site takes ZERO cut, so more than ever of your money goes towards making great new indie games.” If you have some spare cash and an interest in these games, take a moment to support the devs!

59 Comments

I think it’s always been like that. Because, to hell with currency exchange and different values. Also, to hell with Europeans, they can just charge us 30% more and get away with it. Origin does the same thing, I think only GOG offers that fair price thing…

Last time I checked, for Sweden, they had prices in SEK, but the conversion rates were even more skewed. Their policy of $1 = €1 = 10 SEK => 45 % price increase, since in reality, 10 SEK = €1.09 = $1.45.

Once I realized this, the whole US vs. Europe regional pricing thing became mystifying to me. The games are the same price, there’s just an additional tax on Europeans to pay for actually functional governments. If the nominal game prices are the same, Europeans are getting a better deal because they get their game and their government, while Americans only get the game.

I’m not sure why this didn’t make it into the article considering the fact that Dishonored did, but Steam is having a huge sale of 2K titles. Their entire catalog as a matter of fact. You can get a bunch of great games (Borderlands franchise, XCOM, Bioshock franchise, Civilization franchise etc.), some of them must-have, for really small amounts of currency.

Re: The GUMSHOE music bundle: I’ve been using the Eternal Lies Suite as background music for the RPG campaign of the same name for a while now, and it is excellent. Well worth it if you’re playing any type of spooky pen and paper RPG, and probably still worth it if you just enjoy a bit of atmospheric music. The other tracks in the bundle are by the same composer, so I assume they’re of comparable quality.

Minor correction: The game is free to download this weekend, but the 48 hour timer on it only starts from the first moment you load it up.

So basically you can download it now (however long that takes you, even to the end of the weekend), and then leave it until you’ve got some time to give it a good try and see how it is.

NOTE: The sale is only for this weekend, so you’re still probably recommended to try it now if you want to decide on whether to buy it or not. If you just want to give it a go regardless it doesn’t matter, but if you want to buy it at a discount, that sale still expires at the end of this weekend.

I’m half-Malaysian and I love visiting the motherland to see my cousins, the tiny outside food stores, roti canai and dhal, the huge air conditioned shopping malls, and Durians (maybe not the bit about Durians).

Malaysia – it’s a great country, and I’d rather be over there in the sticky, humid heat than here in cold England.

I’m going to question whether you read the bit of my comment in brackets. (You know, the bit where I admit it was just a toy to get Cassandra to throw a plushie at me:)

ETA: This was a response to Jac, in case that wasn’t obvious. Curiously, the broken comment system has inserted it above several earlier comments, suggesting that it might be keeping the threaded order, but losing the indenting.

Greggh – every time someone decides to get overly offensive, someone comes around to play hack ’em up with the offending comment thread and what gets left in the aftermath is a bunch of disjointed and confusing gobbledygook often referring to the post that put everyone into an uproar.

I’ve only played the prototype – I very, very rarely pay for ‘early access’ stuff by any name – but I have to say I’ve been following VA-11 HALL-A really closely since I discovered it. I’m fascinated by the way it builds its world, and that art style is just utterly gorgeous.

So if anyone is buying the “GUMSHOE Music Bundle”, I’d recommend checking out rpg.drivethrustuff.com because they’re having a sale on all Lovecraftian-themed games (at least in the U.S.) for Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, etc. including core books, source books and adventure modules. Which I happen to have just bought a bunch of :D